John Cheever

John Cheever was the second son of a middle-class family. His father, originally a successful shoe manufacturer in New England, lost money in the declining economy, and the family fell into financial straits. As a young student, Cheever attended Thayer Academy, but was later expelled; he wrote a short story, “Expelled,” about the experience, which was published in 1930 in The New Republic. In 1938, he worked as an editor for the Federal Writers’ Project in Washington, D.C., and married his wife, Mary Winternitz, in 1941. In 1942, Cheever enlisted in the Army and became part of the Signal Corps; a year later, in 1943, he published his first collection of short stories, The Way Some People Live. Cheever’s short stories were published in many magazines, including The Atlantic and The New Republic, but he was often associated with the style and aesthetic sensibility of The New Yorker. After the war, Cheever moved his family to Sutton Place, in Manhattan, and then out to the suburbs, eventually residing—from 1961 onwards—in Ossining, New York. Many of his stories draw clear inspiration from this suburban milieu, including those in his 1953 collection The Enormous Radio and Other Stories and The Stories of John Cheever (1978), the latter of which won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1979. His debut novel, The Wapshot Chronicle (1957), won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. Despite his notoriety, Cheever’s personal life was troubled: he was a heavy drinker, received psychiatric treatment for depression, and sustained multiple affairs with both men and women. He was diagnosed with cancer in 1981, and died in 1982.